The Linley Group offers a possible reason why Apple is limiting Siri to iPhone 4S.

To reduce system cost and eliminate the extra package required for the Audience chip, Apple cut a deal to integrate the noise-reduction technology directly into its A5 processor, which appears in the iPhone 4S. This technology is critical for the new phone because not only does it improve call quality, it blocks out background noise when users provide voice commands to Siri, the intelligent assistant built into the iPhone 4S. Without this noise reduction, Siri would be unusable even with a modest amount of background noise.

Recently I had installed Dragon Search and Dragon Dictation on my 3GS. While the underlying software that power these apps and Siri are from Nuance, the above finding by The Linley Group could be a reason why Nuance’s Dragon software titles have difficulties in a crowded room in my phone.

Apple is of course known to refrain from introducing or featuring technologies and abilities that have yet to meet its own threshold of acceptable performance in its products.

Another reason that have come up in the past for the lack of Siri in older products was the possibility that because Siri is still in beta, the company may be testing and collecting data to eventually deliver a more complete experience.

Of course, should Apple offer Siri in older iPhones, the value of iPhone 4S will be diminished greatly, and Apple certainly doesn’t want that to happen given that the company still sells the 3GS and 4 for the lower end of the market.

Internationally though, it makes little difference since Siri doesn’t offer much of an assistance beyond dictation and personal reminders outside of the United States at the moment anyway. Additionally, its linguistic limitations makes Siri practically unusable in many markets.

/via @charlesarthur

The Linley Group offers a possible reason why Apple is limiting Siri to iPhone 4S.

The LA Times brought up the issue that Scottish people have with Siri. Despite being part of the UK, the Scots clearly have such thick accents that Siri has trouble understanding them. The results are obviously unfortunate for the Scots and for Apple but make for some humorous exchanges. At least Apple knows it has a wee bit of problem over the Atlantic.

Avid Studio goes to the iPad

AllThingsD:

“We’ve seen a shift in how creation is happening, and it’s really happening on almost any device,” said Tanguy Leborgne, vice president of consumer and mobile technology strategy at Avid. “We think the tablet is more than just a consumer device; more and more people are creating on it.”

The app will be iPad only for now and costs $4.99 for the first 30 days after which it will be $7.99. 

If there’s anyone out there who still say the iPad is a media consumption device, go suck on this.

Avid Studio goes to the iPad

Thinking about ebooks the way we think about console games and mobile apps

Maybe I haven’t thought this through but amidst all this kerfuffle about proprietary eBook formats, has anyone thought about ebook platforms? Apple has its own format for iBooks, Amazon’s Kindle reads its own format as well, so does Kobo, etc. Yes, there’s the standard ePub format that everyone is supposed to agree on but we know that it may not necessarily serve the commercial interests of each eBook platform provider.

Authors and publishers are pretty much beholden to the whims of platform providers like Apple and Amazon because they rely on these big consumer electronics guys to deliver their work to their readers as far as the digital format is concerned.

Why not think of these as platforms? You know, just like how console game developers have to recreate their games for every console they want to distribute their games on. Just like how mobile application developers have to recode their apps to deliver the best experience on each mobile platform. Just like how software developers have to redo their work for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

The path that delivered us these platforms may have differed from how the ebook formats have come to be but what we have now is pretty much the same situation. Consider the standard ePub format as the web app of ebooks, able to be read anywhere on any platform but has yet to deliver the richer experience that “native” formats are able to.

Just a thought.

Foxconn’s workers in context

The working conditions at Foxconn has been the subject of much discussion and outrage over the last few days following the New York Times exposé. Apple has since bore the majority, if not the full, brunt of the criticisms for allowing what looks to be a sweatshop full of suicides with workers earning very little while making iProducts despite other consumer electronics companies also employing Foxconn to do their manufacturing and assembly.

What everybody has missed on however, is context. Thanks to Tim Worstall at Forbes, we now have that context and even better, there’s a clear infographic to illustrate that if you can’t be bothered reading Worstall’s counter argument. I had to link to Worstall’s entire blog instead of the infographic post since Forbes seems to have messed up the link but I’ll embed it for you.

Foxconn’s workers in context

The four types of BlackBerry users

I’m just gonna let you see the infographic yourself.

The four types of BlackBerry users

Apple’s Financial Results Visualized

If you’re looking to easily track and visualize Apple’s financial performance from quarter to quarter, Francesco Schwarz has put together an interactive chart that you can play around with to see how Apple has done over the past decade. The chart goes back to Q1 2002.

Apple’s Financial Results Visualized

Reason to Attend Conferences: The People

Earlier this week I posted some thoughts on DailySocial on whether it’s worth attending conferences, especially technology-oriented conferences.

In it I said that the contents of conferences generally aren’t worth the money you pay to attend because you’ll more likely come across them on the Internet one way or another. Often the keynotes or talks are posted online via streaming, live blogs, look backs, or podcasts. Photos are almost always abound.

What makes conferences worth attending, I argued, are the connections you make with fellow attendees whether they’re new acquaintances or friends that you rarely catch up with and the chance to meet or rub shoulders with other people in the industry.

In San Francisco this past few days was Macworld | iWorld, the latest incarnation of the long-running Macworld Expo. Stephen Hackett at 512 pixels posted his own thoughts about attending the conference.

Again, the talks and speeches at Macworld can be found online, but  what he found most valuable is the chance to catch up with a lot of people that he wold not have otherwise met in person on a regular basis.

As he said,

I learned that people I know from the Internet are real people and – more importantly – that our friendships are real, even though we don’t see each other most of the time

Tumblr Search is Badly Broken

This is something that has been bugging me for ages. Despite having a search capability in both the dashboard and the blog page, it’s practically impossible to search for anything in your own Tumblr blog.

While the search drop down in the dashboard offers multiple options including searching through your own posts, it would almost always return zero results. Sometimes it would return posts that have been tagged accordingly but even then it’s never a complete set of results, many posts with relevant results would go missing.

Searching for a word or sentence that clearly is there within a particular post would never return that post in the results page.

If search is so difficult to implement for Tumblr, why not hand it over to Bing or Google? Tumblr should have a properly working content search ability. Categorization is one thing but often search is the best method to find content. If a search query for a particular text cannot find the relevant results even though they are actually there, then either don’t have it at all or outsource it to someone else.

iMessage Activation Issues

Today I found out that iMessage on my iPhone had stopped working. Last time I used iMessage was last weekend but yesterday I had taken out the SIM card from the phone for the first time in months and did not realize until today that iMessage was turned off. Now I’m having problems with iMessage activation.

Ever since iOS 5 came out, I’ve been using iMessage in place of SMS whenever possible. I registered my iPad and iPhone 3GS using the same email address and through a little bit of trickery, avoided registering my phone number for it. In other words, iMessage on my iPhone works only through email and that’s how I want it.

Another reason why I don’t want to register my phone number to iMessage is because I’m using Axis, an Indonesian carrier which isn’t registered with Apple as its iPhone partner. In most cases, only approved carriers can have their customers registered to iMessage and FaceTime. There is an unexplained anomaly that allows Indosat numbers to be accepted by Apple’s activation server for iMessage and FaceTime despite the network not selling iPhones.

Trying to register to FaceTime or iMessage with a number from a non-partner carrier will result in your phone credits being drained without your knowledge because it uses background SMS process to send, acknowledge, and receive activation requests.

If the phone fails to receive an acknowledgement from the activation server, it will keep sending background text commands over and over again through the SMS channel using international rates. Fastest way to lose money through your phone.

How did I enable iMessage without a phone number back in October? What I did was I took out the SIM card from the phone, put it in Airplane mode and turned on iMessage. I can’t remember what the precise steps were (it was back in October 2011), but after entering my Apple ID email, the service accepted it and activated iMessage for me. I then added my iCloud email as well.

Things went fine until yesterday when I couldn’t send any text over iMessage. Earlier today I checked the Settings app and iMessage was set to off. When I turned it back on, it was waiting for activation.

After a few seconds, the settings for Messages ended up as above, signifying that the two emails I used (Apple ID email and iCloud email) for iMessage had been verified and approved but the status on screen was still waiting for activation. So I took out the SIM card, went into Airplane mode, reconnected to wifi and yes, I turned iMessage off and on again. I also repeated the process after turning the iPhone off and on again.

A few hours later it still won’t show up as activated despite me having already used iMessage to chat with a couple of friends (see the image above). It’s obvious that it’s trying to complete the activation for my phone number but I don’t want that to happen. If iPad and iPod touch can have iMessage activated only using email, why not the iPhone? It also worked before, why not now?

I’m still trying to figure out how to stop iMessage from trying to rob me of my money by sending multiple activation request to Apple’s servers. I don’t want to have to turn off iMessage but I don’t want it to waste my money either.

Clearly there is a way to activate iMessage on iPhone without the phone number (I did it last year) but I must have missed a step or two in the process. Anyone know or have any idea what I missed? I need to get iMessage working again on my 3GS without the phone number. No, I’m not considering a switch to a number from an approved network.